Stockholm, Sweden – August 11, 2017 White Wolf Entertainment, creator of the World of Darkness and Vampire: The Masquerade are partnering with DriveThruRPG to allow independent content creators to publish material set in the World of Darkness using the Storytellers Vault.

For over a quarter century, fans of the World of Darkness have aspired to bring their own unique World of Darkness creations to the masses, and now they can as part of the Storytellers Vault, White Wolf’s new creator content program. Beginning with Vampire: The Masquerade, aspiring writers, artists, and game designers can publish their non-canonical table top RPG supplements and fiction stories worldwide in the language of their choosing, and making half of the revenue as their royalty. To assist content creators making the best possible products, Storytellers Vault offers a considerable variety of graphical layout tools including pre-made design templates, and art-packs to choose from.

“World of Darkness fans have always shared their stories with the world, and now is the time we help them to do that in an even greater scale” says CEO Tobias Sjögren. “The magic of the Storytellers Vault is supporting fans that love and want to create content from all eras of our games, we can’t wait to see what they produce and how everyone enjoys it!”

The Storytellers Vault features:

Self-publish service for table top RPG material set using any of the four previously published editions of Vampire: The Masquerade

Content creators themselves set the price for the material they publish and receive 50% of the revenue

Access to over 15 templates and art packs produced helps content creators make their work look as professional as the official products from any set era

Publishing in any language supporting the vast global World of Darkness community

Additional content supporting other game lines and historical settings in the White Wolf catalogue will be progressively unlocked beginning in October 2017

About White Wolf
White Wolf is a licensing company focused on creating the best participatory brands in the world. Since its original entry into the roleplaying game market in 1991, White Wolf’s World of Darkness has grown to be one of the most recognized and successful brands in the hobby game space with collective book sales in excess of 10 million copies during this time. White Wolf’s World of Darkness brands, which include Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, Wraith: The Oblivion, and Orpheus, has been licensed for television series, console and computer video games, interactive media events, and a myriad of merchandise and other entertainment products.www.white-wolf.com
Contact: press@white-wolf.com

About DriveThruRPGDriveThruRPG.com is part of a family of premiere online marketplaces including RPGNow, DriveThruRPG, DriveThruCards, DMsGuild, DriveThruComics, DriveThruFiction, and Wargame Vault. Together, we have been selling digital and print-on-demand comic books, roleplaying games, and fiction since 2001. As of 2016, we have launched multiple community content programs as well as our Community Card Creator for fans to create content for some of their favorite roleplaying and card games.www.onebookshelf.com
Contact: matt@onebookshelf.com

Last month we shared our Vampire The Masquerade fifth edition (V5) pre-alpha playtest at World of Darkness Berlin, with over 100 playtesters from 26 different countries. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive and did not raise any red flags about content or core systems. Last week we released it to the world, and we are grateful for all your survey responses, emails, social media comments, and reviews. Now we are working on the alpha playtest for GenCon 2017, but your feedback on the pre-alpha makes it clear that we need to provide some context for the playtest and for V5.

White Wolf, the World of Darkness, and Vampire: The Masquerade all share a long and proud tradition of exploring contemporary issues through a dark roleplaying lens. Throughout the development of the fifth edition of Vampire (V5), our goals have explicitly included the proud continuation of this tradition, while also supporting an incredibly entertaining roleplaying game experience. We strive to explore difficult and disturbing subjects maturely, but not gratuitously, building on the brave heritage of previous editions.

We don’t plan to abandon this practice, which has been a core part of Vampire for a quarter-century: this is a roleplaying game about monsters.

Make no mistake, the player characters in the V5 pre-alpha playtest are monsters and villains. Through them, we intend for our players to view the Camarilla sect from the Anarch perspective, as a perverse and privileged class of old-school vampires and who adhere to an antiquated code of morality and obsessed by the realpolitik of staying in power at any price. The player characters are written as dictators and collaborators who deserve to fall hard, perhaps even deserve to die, as they are torn from power.

The nature of the Curse makes each sin vampires might inflict upon the world erode their souls. Yet vampires must live off the blood of humans. The longer they exist, the longer they visit their own evil upon the world, they become ever-more distant and alien to the world around them. Their actions have terrible consequences for themselves and others; some of them can be considered truly evil. This internal conflict has been been at the core of VTM stories since the game’s creation. That is the very essence of the Curse of Caine, and it makes the best vampire a struggling anti-hero and the worst a hypocritical monster like Amelina.

Our oversight, for which we apologize, was not providing this context so that our players could see why and how we made these decisions. We needed to clearly state again that the material was intended for mature audiences, and to label it that way. We should have stated again that our vision for V5 brings Vampire back to its roots as a morality tale about evil, set in the darkest places of our own world. Contemporary, real-world horrors and atrocities are an important part of the setting and by extension – its characters.

We’ll communicate this and other design-choices better as we go forward. We can and will make the game’s contents transparent for those who need them to be by giving you fair warning. We want our game’s dark tone to be truly earned, giving it meaning and the opportunity for our players to use it to tell stories of genuinely personal and political horror.

As we release future previews, you’ll see that V5 will include many relevant, timely story elements like the global migrant and refugee crises, drug abuse, human trafficking, urban decay, homelessness, government corruption, ecological crises and political instability. V5 characters will have the opportunity to interact with these topics through scenarios designed to prompt insight and critical thinking, while also being exciting, dramatic, and thrilling, as each Storyteller deems appropriate. Our goal is to allow our players to use these elements to explore tough topics through the lens of roleplaying, to the extent they are interested in exploring such ideas.

Our plan for V5 also includes providing tools and techniques for adjusting the game to personal tastes. There will be techniques to deal with difficult subject matter and strong emotions. We’ll give you the means to focus your V5 chronicles on any aspect of Vampire: The Masquerade that you’ve ever enjoyed, from terrifyingly intimate scenes of very personal horror to the repulsive global power plays of the Camarilla Kindred. You’ll get expert guidance helping you to shine the spotlight on ripped-from-the-headlines realism or insidious parlor politics as you choose.

If you prefer the bloody violence of a street-level drama set against the backdrop of vampire gang warfare and an Anarch Baron’s rise and fall, you can tell that story in V5. You can also join Beckett in his global quest to unravel hidden and forbidden Kindred secrets, or come face to face with the consequences of a modern intelligence community as instruments of government overreach while unraveling the horrifying intrigues of a Camarilla Prince. The V5 stories will scale downward, upward, and sideways as you decide.

Our next live playtest will take place at GenCon 2017 in Indianapolis, and we hope you will join us there, not only to celebrate this convention’s 50th anniversary, but also to participate in the shared creation of a game we all love, and talk about it with us in person. Looking forward to seeing you there.

Blood and Souls,

/ The V5 team

V5 Pre-Alpha QAWe answer some of the most common questions about the V5 Pre-Alpha. Feel free to send us more questions.

Q: Why is Amelina a pedophile? A: She’s not. She has an obsession with young (recently embraced) Kindred and a feeding restriction that forces her to feed from children and young teens.Q: Why did you use the term “triggered” to describe someone easily offended on ideological grounds? A: Because that is the common usage of the term in everyday language, no disrespect intended. Q: Why are so many characters children (“Club Kids”)?A: The term Club Kid (at least in Sweden) means a youngish (roughly 18-25) person who spends all their free time at clubs, often under the influence of drugs.

Put aside the guesswork and feverish speculation: the V5 pre-alpha playtest is here!

Today we are sharing with you the Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition (V5) pre-alpha playtest kit, which includes the V5 pre-alpha rules and a special V5 pre-alpha scenario, The Night After. We invite you to download the kit and try it out: invite a few friends to play through the scenario together, talk about it, and then share your opinions with us through the online survey. We appreciate your feedback and value your input.

We will close the survey on 1 August in preparation for the alpha playtest.

We recommend strongly that you play the scenario and not just read the rules document. Actual play is the best way to experience and understand new rules concepts. In fact we suggest that you play it more than once, making different decisions each time to experience the full scope of the rules.

This version of the rules is pre-alpha. That means it’s not feature complete, and the designers have not made final decisions about what rules and features will be included. It was created specifically to test the new Hunger Dice mechanics for a live playtest at the World of Darkness Berlin fan convention in May. Much will change between this version and the Alpha, Beta, and final release versions.

We understand that you may be tempted to use this material to test the rules in ways that aren’t intended (such as trying to reverse-engineer the rules into your own scenarios, or published scenarios). We don’t recommend this: the pre-alpha rules were created specifically for The Night After scenario, and aren’t even close to final. We strongly recommend using them only to play The Night After scenario.

The Night After is a scenario that was designed specifically for these pre-alpha rules. It provides a glimpse into the tumultuous and destructive events that occurred in Berlin in May 2017, as told in Enlightenment in Blood, a VTM LARP event at the WoD Berlin convention. The scenario takes place on the evening immediately after Enlightenment in Blood, but no knowledge of that LARP or its events is necessary to enjoy the playtest.

White Wolf Entertainment is proud to announce that our experimental interactive narrative ”We eat Blood…” has been chosen as an official selection at IndieCade 2017 and as an official selection for the E3 IndieCade ShowCase. The game is also nominated and in competition for the 2017 IndieCade Awards. The Prelude games are the first digital games where White Wolf acts as an independent developer.

”We eat Blood…” is an interactive horror-story about your first nights on the edge of a secret World of Darkness hidden just under the surface of contemporary Los Angeles, made for mobile but also available on Steam as part of our World of Darkness Preludes Bundle.

Written and illustrated by comic-book artist Sarah Horrocks (Ophelia, Dysnomia, Hecate Snake Diaries, Bruise) and award winning fine artist and rpg-designer Zak Sabbath (We Did Porn, Pictures Showing What Happenson Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow, Red and Pleasant Land, Vornheim, Maze of the Blue Medusa and more), ”We eat Blood…” is one of two artist-driven explorations of the World of Darkness published this spring. Featuring a full music score by Ossian Reynolds, (Zaza). This is the first title for the White Wolf team.

World of Darkness is the legendary rpg- setting behind cult PC rpg ”Vampire the Masquerade – Bloodlines” and the ”Hunter the Reckoning” console games series.

”By creating a situation where all interaction with the game-world is mediated through text messages and sent images, we tried to create genuine feelings of confusion, helplessness, attachment, shock, desperation and fear.” – Zak Sabbath

The second game, ”Mage the Ascension – Refuge”, a story about the war for Reality during the Syrian refugee crisis in Sweden, written by award-winning weird fiction author Karin Tidbeck, is also included in the bundle that goes on sale at a discount prize for a limited time this weekend!

helping to create a public perception of games as rich, diverse, artistic, and culturally significant. A perfect match for the thoughtful exploration of contemporary social and political issues found in White Wolf’s World of Darkness universe.

White Wolf and the World of Darkness Berlin 2017 convention and games festival are proud to release a World of Darkness-themed quiz app for iOS and Android. You can download World of Darkness Quizima for free to compete against your friends in a World of Darkness- and thematically related trivia contest!

The addictive app is fun in itself, but it also provides the digital qualifying round for the convention’s “World Championships of Darkness” event. The World of Darkness: Berlin team and app makers Planeto will monitor the system’s backend to extract a definitive high score list of Digital Champions of Darkness. Anyone participating the game who is attending World of Darkness: Berlin is invited to compete in the live finals. During the month of April, participants who score high enough will be entered into a lottery for free admittance to the World of Darkness: Berlin convention.

“The events at World of Darkness: Berlin are all about having fun together and celebrating a shared love for White Wolf’s World of Darkness in all its forms, everything from tabletop rpgs, larps and card games to celebrating fan passion – regardless whether it’s Storytelling, art, game design, writing, costumes or lore and trivia. We’ve been looking for a way to include White Wolf fans who are unable to attend World of Darkness: Berlin, yet want to participate in the fun,” explains Participation | Design | Agency AB producer Johanna Koljonen.

“We’re very excited to partner with the top Swedish quiz company Planeto to make this happen and are thrilled that fans around the world will be able to qualify through the app for the Berlin trivia contest event in advance” said White Wolf CEO, Tobias Sjögren.

World of Darkness Quizima is an official White Wolf licensed product that exists thanks to the dedication and expertise of the fans that willed it into existence. The questions were written by an international team of volunteers: Fabio Garbo, Søren Hjorth, Minna Joki, Henrik Klippström, Federica Sustersic and Jere Tupala.

The production and editorial management was executed by Participation Design Agency, the producing team responsible for the World of Darkness: Berlin Convention and games festival.

Karin has a long history with World of Darkness. I vividly remember Karin posing assuming Horrid Form after a Rage game we played in together in the late 1990s, and she quotes Mage:The Ascension as one of her major sources of early inspiration for her writing. Her stories are often about realities in flux and the power of language, and how we all share the power to shape the world through our thoughts and words. Having her come back to Mage with us is a dream come true, and exactly the kind of thing we love to enable here at White Wolf.

Photo: Andreas Igefjord.

In the autumn of 2015 Karin volunteered to work in a refugee reception centre in Sweden as thousands of people escaping the war in Syria arrived in her home city of Malmö. The thoughts and feelings that herexperience provoked are at the core of ”Refuge”.

It’s an important story. A personal story. And a story intimately tied to the core themes of Mage – the war for truth and the price of power.

Karin debuted with the short story collection Vem är Arvid Pekon? in 2010 followed by the novel Amatka in 2012, to be published internationally in 2017. Her first work in English, the short story collection Jagannath, was published in 2012 by Cheeky Frawg to favourable reviews, with Gary K. Wolfe describing Tidbeck as “one of the most distinctive new voices in short fiction since Margo Lanagan”.

The collection made the shortlist for the 2012 James Tiptree, Jr. Award and was nominated for the World Fantasy Award. The short story “Augusta Prima”, originally written in Swedish, was translated into English by Tidbeck who won a Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award (2013) in the Short Form category.

Beyond her work as a weird fiction author, Karin has worked in Swedens premiere SciFi bookstore, written live-action games about Nordic faeries and has gone on a pilgrimage to Santiago De Compostella.

We have received many questioning or critical emails and comments over the last few days about Vampire: The Masquerade – We Eat Blood. Some of these are in relation to game writer and artist Zak Sabbath, others are about the content of the game. We continue to read them all; we welcome all feedback, and value this ongoing dialogue.

First, we recognize that we need to clarify the wording of our blog post from last week. We realise now that it could be interpreted as a dismissal of people’s experiences, and that was never our intention. Nor did we intend to imply that we think anyone was being actively dishonest, and we are very sorry if that’s how it seemed. We understand how hurtful that could seem, and we regret it.

Naturally we are aware that Zak Sabbath is a controversial figure. Before deciding to work with Sarah Horrocks and Zak Sabbath on We Eat Blood, we read as deeply as we could about the historical conflicts around him. These issues seemed to be several years old, were debated exhaustively online, and were very complex.

Our reading and the conversations we had with people in the industry who have interacted with him in the past did not unearth any new or factual evidence in regards to the more serious allegations periodically made against him. It is however clear that Zak Sabbath is often abrasive, and sometimes his behavior has been perceived as hurtful or offensive. Going forward, we expect him not to engage in any such behaviors, and he has agreed.

The collaboration between Sarah Horrocks and Zak Sabbath brings a unique aesthetic to this work, and we felt Zak Sabbath’s participation would contribute more to the game than allegations about his past private behavior would detract from it.

This brings us to the second point of criticism. Both We Eat Blood and Karin Tidbeck’s Mage: The Ascension – Refuge feature personal experiences and social commentary as the authors explore themes of class, gender, and rising intolerance. Our choice to focus on these themes has led to some critical voices. This is criticism we are proud to receive. Relevant works in any medium are part of a global discourse and we welcome healthy and well-informed debate on these issues. We have said repeatedly that our games will examine contemporary issues through the lens of the World of Darkness, and we do not plan to shy away from this vision.

In addition to this blanket criticism of engagement with contemporary issues, there has been some concern about the inclusion of two transgender vampire characters in We Eat Blood. Given the history of transgender representation in popular culture, we are sensitive to these concerns. So is the game’s co-writer Sarah Horrocks, a noted comic artist and horror blogger, who is also a transgender woman. She writes about her views on her blog: http://mercurialblonde.tumblr.com/post/157431573538.

The criticized character, Avery, is perhaps the most helpful and kick-ass vampire in the game. She saves your ass and is (spoiler alert!) one of two main allies at the conclusion. Like Horrocks and Sabbath, we believe this character positively broadens the range of transgender portrayal in games. Naturally, she will not be the last transgender character in a White Wolf game, as we continue work with designers, writers and artists from a wide range of backgrounds.

White Wolf are dedicated to making games that feature mature, contemporary storytelling. We are already engaged with a network of partners from all over the world, of all genders and backgrounds, and we are working every day to increase that reach and diversity. We do that because we strongly believe that diversity results in the best stories, and that without representation across intersections those stories will not reflect the world we live in.